Rotherham is not an isolated incident

Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale who helped expose the Cyril
Smith scandal, warns that similar abuse is taking place across the country

The shadow of abuse: 'A lost generation is being created'Photo: Getty Images

By Simon Danczuk

9:34AM BST 31 Aug 2014

The ball bounces high in the shadows off the gable end and a handful of kids chase it down the road. Under the stairway to the flats nearby, half a dozen teenage girls lie sprawled on the concrete, sheltering from the slate-grey drizzle. They watch the ball ping back up the street, strung out in the fading evening light, as the acrid smell of cannabis hangs overhead. Further down the road, a group of lads in hoodies mill around the off-licence asking passers-by if they can buy a few cans of strong lager for them.

It’s a scene you’ll find in many parts of northern England and one I’m all too familiar with. Even now, when I see the boredom and despair in kids’ eyes out on the streets, the same feeling comes back to me. Growing up in a single-parent family near Burnley, drinking at 14 and hanging around off-licences asking grown-ups to buy me a drink, just as I see in Rochdale now, I knew about the vulnerability of kids roaming the streets with nothing to do. There were dangers then, but now it’s worse. For gangs of men looking to groom kids to be violently abused, they’re easy prey.

Scenes like this are not far from Rochdale Council’s new £50 million offices. But when I spoke to child-protection bosses in the wake of Rochdale’s grooming scandal a few years ago, where young girls had been continually raped by gangs of men, I may as well have been in a foreign country. Despite talking about a reality that existed a few minutes’ drive from their offices, there was no awareness of what life was like for these kids. No connection, no empathy. The head of the Rochdale Safeguarding Children Board told me they needed to take “a deeper dive into the theory” to understand the problem. The director of children’s services implied to me that young girls who were being raped were “making lifestyle choices”. She later admitted to an incredulous home affairs select committee that she’d never met any of the victims.

The impression I got was that they viewed these girls as an astronomer would look through a telescope at planets. Their lives were so far from the girls’ experiences that to them, they might as well have been a remote dot.

The Rochdale grooming scandal would have never come to light had it not been for the fantastic health care workers who helped these young girls. They listened, they understood and they cared. They were steeped in working-class community values, not remote theory. One of them in particular tried desperately hard to get the police and social services to listen to the girls and take action, but to no avail.

The problem then, as now in Rotherham, was a middle-class management in children’s services that simply didn’t want to know and didn’t care. The author of the Rotherham report, Prof Alexis Jay, said last week that a group of senior managers held a view that couldn’t be challenged. This despotic approach is ruining social work and failing families. Where once there was a fair representation of working-class social workers who could listen and relate to all manner of challenging families, the profession is now stuffed with textbook professionals bereft of emotional intelligence and incapable of relating to troubled kids. And for the good ones still left, they’re all too often forced to adopt foolish practices that fly in the face of common sense.

Sit before children’s services managers and you’re likely to hear endless waffle about guidelines, policies, procedures, strategy and thresholds. But they won’t mention the kids. Worse still, management never refers to practitioners or seeks advice from those at the coalface. Experience has no currency. Cold, remote theory rules. In the wake of the Rochdale grooming scandal, a Serious Case Review was critical of the health workers whose outreach work had uncovered an endemic child abuse problem. Amazingly, they were criticised for having the wrong qualifications.

Once you start heading down this road, where management exists in a bubble and an organisation’s values come from textbooks rather than the people they serve, then you end up with situations like Rotherham. Where political correctness and cultural sensitivity are more important than child rape. Managers become more interested in ticking boxes in diversity training than protecting children. And social-work bosses ban families from looking after children because they’re members of Ukip and not sufficiently versed in multiculturalism.

This is dogma for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Common sense is not on the menu.

The collapse of the banks a few years back was brought about by bad management and the cult of leadership. The leaders of these banks not only followed a tick-box culture that allowed them to avoid their responsibilities, but also had no concept of the values within their organisation and didn’t even understand their own complex financial instruments.

In many areas of social work, the same tick-box culture, lack of values and a failure to have the remotest understanding of the complex lives of those being dealt with is bringing about a similar collapse. And like the banks, it will have far-reaching consequences for society.

We’re also starting to see a worrying cult of leadership. Highly paid managers are seemingly untouchable and distant from front-line workers. The rise of the unsackable, unaccountable and unapologetic public-sector manager is a trend that will only see services continue to deteriorate. And let’s be clear about what that means. It won’t be just missed targets or a poor Ofsted rating. We’re storing up huge social costs.

Think of the 1,400 children abused in Rotherham. They were beaten, had guns pointed at their heads, were routinely gang raped, had petrol poured over them and were threatened with being set alight. What do you think happens to these kids?

They don’t tend to end up in nice jobs, washing their cars in the suburban sunshine on a Sunday morning. They grow up angry, resentful and lost to society. The Prime Minister talks about sending in welfare squads to tackle “problem families”, but what about the lost generation that’s being created now by allowing children to be abused on an industrial level?

I’ve sat before these people and listened to their stories. I remember every one. Some have managed to turn their lives around, and these stories are inspirational. But, for most, the burden of abuse is too heavy to bear. Kids who walk through the fire of extreme abuse make very different choices to the rest of us. They end up joining the Foreign Legion, committing violent crimes, taking drugs or sleeping on the streets. When I looked at the criminal record of one victim and asked why he couldn’t stay on the straight and narrow, he told me it was safer in prison.

For most, they struggle to make relationships and the human cost is massive. “I don’t have friends, I prefer to be on my own because I don’t trust people,” one sexually abused man told me. He’d made a living over the past 20 years working with the travelling community on the margins of society. These were the only people who didn’t judge him, he said.

But talking to bosses in children’s services and the multitude of highly paid professionals running our protective agencies, you’ll never get any real understanding of the depth or complexity of the people they’re dealing with. It’s become a cold science where the hard work of gaining trust, taking a human approach and supporting people has been replaced with a detached, long-lens view. And it’s not just management that has this view. At one point last year, I made a complaint on behalf of one of the Rochdale grooming victims as a social worker kept appearing outside her house, peering through the window. Is that the “help” a survivor of sexual abuse needs?

This dearth of understanding does not only relate to victims. Too little is known about the perpetrators of these crimes and too frequently I get the impression that politically correct reasons prevent authorities from trying to find out more or challenge these people.

Some are poor men from rural Kashmiri communities, or second- or third-generation Kashmiris or Pakistanis who have developed or inherited an openly violent misogyny. I visited one abuser in prison – he’d attacked a female prostitute with a hammer and was clearly mentally ill. I asked the family about his wife, who’d come over from Kashmir two years before and spoke no English, only to be told that she knew he was in prison but wasn’t aware of the crimes he’d committed.

I’ve also had family members come to my surgery asking me to make representations on behalf of brothers who have been found guilty of child sex abuse. When I refuse, I frequently receive a tirade of abuse. “These girls are prostitutes,” one man shouted at me, and warned that I would pay a heavy price for not supporting him. He’d get thousands of people not to vote for me.

As a Labour politician, it can be difficult challenging some of these issues, but you can’t ignore child abuse and violent misogyny. Three years ago, former home secretary Jack Straw said some Pakistani men see white girls as “easy meat” for abuse. He was accused of perpetuating racist attitudes. Like all political parties, the Labour Party is a broad church. But I fear too many hold the view expressed by former Rotherham MP, Denis MacShane, last week. He avoided child abuse in his constituency, he told the BBC, because he was “a Guardian-reading liberal Leftie” and didn’t want to “rock the multicultural community boat”.

Last week I received a text message from a current Labour MP saying she was disappointed by my views on this issue. I was only elected in 2010 and already I’ve found that politicians are sometimes discouraged from exploring and investigating complex issues because they’re expected to stay tethered to a dominant ideology and not stray far from the stock replies to difficult questions. This does nothing to strengthen democracy. It weakens it, and creates cynicism. The public want to see matters like this discussed and they want politicians to come up with answers, not just endless hand-wringing.

I’m in no doubt that Rotherham is not an isolated case, and the same kind of abuse is happening right now in towns and cities across the country. As shocking as the Rotherham report is, the fallout out from this type of abuse and the long-term social consequences are even more horrifying.

Far too many people are sliding into an underclass as a result of violent abuse that fails to register with protective agencies. Inquiries, reports and media scrutiny are only the beginning of the change we need. If we’re going to save a lost generation from having childhood innocence ripped from them, then we need to stop obsessing about multiculturalism and reform children’s services now.